Own Your Self by Kelly Brogan

Author:Kelly Brogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

FALLING UP: FEEL AND MOVE THROUGH

Moving through the Dark Night, you can feel as if your entire life is in a free fall, complete with a sense that you’re heading toward inevitable doom. It’s not unusual for childlike terror to overcome your formerly adaptive adult faculties, leaving you feeling like your insides are twisted up in your throat, and your mind is screaming, NO!

Most of my patients spend weeks in this state (not months, not years, just weeks). This is a passage that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the key to the bounded timing of this process lies in giving it a context that allows for a radical shift in perspective out of victimhood and into meaning. What you might have formerly referred to by the highly charged and largely nonspecific labels of anxiety or depression (Here it is again! It’s back! I knew I was sick and broken!), you are now being asked to reframe as important missives from deeply buried places of hurt. Simply put, you are being asked to move beyond the struggle with seemingly random and burdensome anxiety, depression, and fatigue . . . to go deeper, to their wise roots, and commit to learning about yourself and shining the light of acceptance on these dark, rejected, tender parts.

There are techniques to navigate the Dark Night that I can and will share with you, but first I want to offer you a context for your experience. Here is a phrase I hope you’ll adopt: falling up. (You may remember that children’s book author and cartoonist Shel Silverstein has a wacky book of this title!)

I like to think of dark and light as signifying the processes of rooting and expansion, rather than as bad and good. In tapering, you are moving down into the darkness, the unknown, in order to solidify your capacity to move up and into the light, into the open. You are falling downward in order to ascend. You are falling up.

In falling up, there is meaning. What if this sense of everything disassembling, of disorientation, of confusion, echoed by the constant questioning of Who am I? What am I doing here?—What if all that is a part of the deal? Consider that this is how it feels to shed a false and former skin, to have an awakening into your truer self.

The awakening process strips away all the ways you’ve learned to feel safe in the world, including control, organization, and intellectualized understanding. From those perspectives, you cannot direct this process because you’d be doing it from your old programs: those that you are looking to shed. The only understanding you are mercifully offered in this process is that it is purposeful, and it is preparing you for future happiness. It’s as if you’ve taken a wrecking ball to your old house and now you’re standing in the rubble; for a while, you will wander around in despair, walking through all the places where the old familiar rooms used to be.

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